Top 100 The Ordinary Quotes
#1. You're unbelievable."
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment!"
"I know you didn't mean it as one, Juliet, but when you think about it, what could be more glorious than to be too much, too out of the ordinary, to be believed?
Louisa Edwards
#2. The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.
Antony Beevor
#3. The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved
if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.
Robert A. Heinlein
#4. For me, it is exciting to see a woman take a chance and wear something out of the ordinary.
Narciso Rodriguez
#5. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
Thomas Mann
#6. The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
#7. There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences.
Bill Vaughan
#8. A company can seize extra-ordinary opportunities only if it is very good at the ordinary operations.
Marcel Herrmann Telles
#9. For is my story really so unusual? To wake each morning as if things had gone differently
the dead come back, the lost returned, the beloved in our arms
is it really any more magic than the ordinary madness of hope?
Andrew Sean Greer
#10. The ordinary manner of spending their time, is the only way of judging of people's inclination and genius.
Ellin Devis
#11. I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
John Le Carre
#12. The scientific nature of the ordinary man is to go out and do the best you can.
John Prine
#13. The test of a man's religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. The worth of a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not before the footlights.
Oswald Chambers
#15. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
T. S. Eliot
#16. A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.
Garry Kasparov
#17. Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.
Camille Paglia
#18. Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world.
Tom Standage
#19. Even though I am nearly deaf, I seem to be gifted with a kind of inner hearing which enables me to detect sounds and noises which the ordinary person does not hear.
Thomas A. Edison
#20. Wonder is the sense, which comes in a flash but won't go away, that things are not as straightforward as they seem, that the ordinary way, or explanation and argument leaves you with unbearable contradictions and impossibilities.
Eva Brann
#21. What people don't understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing. There's no other nation in the world where that happens. And it's very much a part of our heritage.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#22. Without seeing the origin of light, the true form of one's Self, the ordinary man sees by the mind different things and is deluded.
Ramana Maharshi
#23. We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren't chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyhow.
Leigh Bardugo
#24. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral of physical government of the world.
Edward Gibbon
#25. There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.
Chris Cleave
#26. My reading and drawing drew me away from the ordinary interests, and I lived a great deal in the world of imagination, feeding upon any book that fell into my hands. When I had got hold of a really thick book like Hugo's 'Les Miserables,' I was happy and would go off into a corner to devour it.
Jacob Epstein
#27. Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.
G. M. Trevelyan
#28. The sheep learn to know the shepherd's voice in the ordinary days of life so that in a time of crisis it can be immediately recognized.
M. Esther Lovejoy
#29. The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.
Andre Malraux
#30. I want to observe the ordinary things of earth - the moon, the stars, the rainbows, even the yellow leaves of the old cherry trees - and receive their messages. To hear them say what every weary traveler, every earnest seeker, longs to hear. Welcome home.
Christie Purifoy
#31. Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.
Chuck Jones
#32. You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational - but it's in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.
Adriana Trigiani
#33. I've tried to make a book that's accessible to the ordinary, intelligent reader. Very often books that cover this kind of subject are written by academics, for academics. But I am not an academic.
Brian Crozier
#34. Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it.
Morley Baer
#35. I thought: This is what the living do. And I swooned at the ordinary nature of the task and myself, at my chapped hands and square palms, at the way my wrists bent and fingers flexed inside this living body.
Dee Williams
#36. It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#37. As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.
Colette
#38. Binoculars, adjusts the oxygen hose around his head again. It was just too damn strange, too damn out of the ordinary. No moving vans, no friends stopping by; neither the husband nor the wife - if they
James Patterson
#39. I want to be able to separate the average from the good and from the great. I want to separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.
Floyd Mayweather Jr.
#40. I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
Graham Swift
#41. Hitler was without a doubt exceptional in his criminal deeds. Yet in many respects, he was not at all out of the ordinary.
Volker Ullrich
#42. The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder.
Erwin Schrodinger
#43. The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit.
James Tate
#44. I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.
Edward Abbey
#45. It is my business as a Sunday school teacher to instill a divine discontent for the ordinary. Only the best possible is good enough for God. Can you say, 'God, I have done all that I can?
Henrietta C. Mears
#46. Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick.
Margaret Atwood
#47. The main goal in my life is to make extraordinary things out of the ordinary.
Vittorio Grigolo
#48. But like a high-strung racehorse who needs extra weight in her saddle pad, I like a handicap and relish the aesthetic challenge posed by the limitations of the ordinary.
Sally Mann
#49. He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful. He
George Orwell
#50. Shit, he said as a great, green glut of water poured up at our feet. I wonder what the ordinary people are doin today.
Tim Winton
#51. I'm not claiming to be anything out of the ordinary. I am not especially big or strong or brave or intrepid.
Roz Savage
#52. How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)
Joseph Campbell
#53. When the will to learn from the ordinary is present, a seeker may indeed gain entrance into levels of awareness that are extraordinary.
Aberjhani
#54. I don't pose as an authority on anything at all, I follow the opinions of the ordinary people I meet, and I take pride in the close-knit teamwork with my organization.
Walt Disney
#55. That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
#56. He needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America.
Michael Lewis
#57. We could form a government of national unity fighting corruption. The ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of it, because it's she or he that pays the price.
Ashraf Ghani
#59. I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, "Oh, I see. That's how it must be." This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#61. In the ordinary business of life punctuality is ... necessary.
Bertrand Russell
#62. The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.
Abraham H. Maslow
#63. The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.
Walter E. Williams
#64. In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own
Mike A. Lancaster
#65. The true moments of one's life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.
Chris Cleave
#66. Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well. As the old-church father said, 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
William Sloane Coffin
#68. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.
G.K. Chesterton
#69. [T]he strike is inherently dangerous to the rich, and to the corporations who have brought this country to her knees, because it is the only defense the ordinary citizen has.
Keith Olbermann
#70. Drop the idea of being Extraordinary! It's keeping you mediocre. To be Ordinary is the most extraordinary thing in the world. The Ordinary person has light in his eyes; he has become extraordinary but he has no idea of it.
Rajneesh
#71. Something out of the ordinary course of business is taking place that creates an investment opportunity. The list of corporate events that can result in big profits for you runs the gamut - spinoffs, mergers, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, asset sales, distributions.
Joel Greenblatt
#72. ... in the ordinary course of a healthy labour, the mouth of the uterus opens by some secret agency; or at least without any apparent force.
Ina May Gaskin
#73. I named my album 'So Uncool' because it defies the ordinary: you're different from everyone else. It's like, being uncool makes you cool because you're different!
Keke Palmer
#74. Fortune may raise up or abuse the ordinary mortal, but the sage and the soldier should have minds beyond her control.
Walter Scott
#75. The great achievements of western capitalism have rebounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.
Milton Friedman
#76. By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
#77. I don't know if it becomes literature ... I just know the two added words cause me to look at the ordinary sentences differently. And quite honestly, I find that to be magical!
Camron Wright
#78. The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.'
Sandra Tsing Loh
#79. Behind every political deal in this country, the first casualties are always the ordinary people, who are barely treated as human.
Ai Weiwei
#80. The ordinary build houses when they have bricks; the extraordinary build mansions when they have pebbles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#81. If you are intelligent, if you are alert, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary.
Osho
#82. No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is.
Evelyn Underhill
#83. Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them.
John Dall
#84. Never forget that it is by choice that the ordinary person decides to live a life that is extraordinary.
Cheryl Koevoet
#85. Consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around. All personalities are not physical. It is only because you are so busily concerned with daily matters that you do not realize that there is a portion of you who knows that its own powers are far superior to those shown by the ordinary self.
Jane Roberts
#86. Fortifications, artillery, foreign aid - will be of no value, unless the ordinary soldier knows that it is HE guarding his country
Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim
#87. Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.
Erica Jong
#89. Pastoral work is a commitment to the everyday: it is an act of faith that the great truths of salvation are workable in the ordinary universe.
Eugene H. Peterson
#90. The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience.
Thomas Jefferson
#91. But you - you notice mailboxes and wastebaskets and... and people. One who can see the ordinary is extraordinary indeed, Abigail Rook. - Jackaby
William Ritter
#92. It is always harder to make time for the truly precious experiences; there is always the ordinary to do.
Philippa Gregory
#93. Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.
Jim Rohn
#94. Whether you are watching a video or playing a game, whether you are doing work or fielding an unwanted phone call, whether you are being successful or smarting from failure - in the ordinary context of daily living, you show the power and viability of Christian faith.
Tedd Tripp
#95. deliberately look for God in the ordinary moments of everyday life.
John Ortberg
#96. The path of specialization leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of understanding in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-day life.
William Barrett
#97. We are apt to mistake our vocation by looking out of the way for occasions to exercise great and rare virtues, and by stepping over the ordinary ones that lie directly in the road before us.
Hannah More
#98. Avoid standardized proliferation of the ordinary at the expense of the irreplaceable.
Raymond Dasmann
#99. May we, as image makers, shapers of the culture, set our sights on things we value, rituals we engage in that heal and serve. May our images honor the ordinary endeavors of common people, and may they make their way to the eyes of the weary - light to the dark, fire to the chill.
Jan Phillips
#100. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
Michelle Malkin
